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Case study booklet

Knowledge ExchangeProgrammes (2012-2013)

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Programme: Development and launch of theActive Healthy Kids Scotland Report Card 2013

Tackling the public health crisis requires synthesis and dissemination of knowledge from research beyond academia. The main aim of this programme was to develop and launch the first Active Healthy Kids Report Card for Scotland. Most Scottish children fail to meet recommendations for physical activity and diet, and the prevalence of obesity is three times as high as in 1990. This is a public health crisis, but with adverse effects beyond health, for educational attainment, the economy, and the environment.

The Active Healthy Kids Scotland Report Card 2013 was developed based on the successful Canadian model, Active Healthy Kids Canada Report Card, aimed at the general public, health policymakers and practitioners.

Aim

To produce a ‘go to’ resource for a wide range of end-users, including policy makers, for evidence on major problems relating to physical activity and health in Scottish children and adolescents.

“The Active Healthy Kids Scotland Report Card 2013 is a ‘state of the nation’ report which provides a critical, up to date, and evidence-based summary of the scale of the problems of physical activity and health of Scottish Children and adolescents”.

The Active Healthy Kids Scotland Report Card 2013 was based on 10 health indicators:

Seven Health Behaviours and Outcomes:

• Sedentary Behaviour, i.e. recreational screen time

• Physical Activity• Active Transport• Active and Outdoor Play • Organised Sport Participation• Diet• Obesity

Three Influences on Health Behaviours and Outcomes:

• Family and Peer Influence• Community and the Built

Environment• National Policy, Strategy, and

Investment

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Programme: Development and launch of theActive Healthy Kids Scotland Report Card 2013

Insights

Specific concerns relating to Scottishchildren were:

• Extremely high exposure to recreational screen time, well above the recommended levels compatible with health and wellbeing

• Extremely low levels of physical activity • Extremely high prevalence of obesity • Physical activity levels were low despite

policy and physical environments favourable to activity

There was also a high degree of socio-economic inequality for some of the indicators.

www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Programmes/Programmes20122013/

ActiveHealthyKidsScotland.aspx

www.activehealthykidsscotland.co.uk

Programme Team:

Prof John J Reilly, University of Strathclyde

Prof Geraldine McNeill andDr Smita Dick, University of Aberdeen

Prof Mark S Tremblay, Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute.

Outcomes

• Launch of the Active Healthy Kids Report Card for Scotland in October 2013 and widespread distribution within Scotland.

• Establishment of a network of individuals and organisations to help sustain the Report Card beyond 2013.

• Linked Scotland formally to the emerging international Active Healthy Kids Network, a global matrix of Active Healthy Kids Report Cards launched at the Global Summit on the Physical Activity of Children in Toronto in May 2014.

• New international links through mentoring of new report cards for Japan, Qatar, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.

• Two academic publications in the Journal of Physical Activity & Health in May 2014.

It is hoped that the project will help influence policy decision-making and provoke structural, policy, or behavioural changes that result in improved healthy active living for Scottish children.

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Programme: Human Trafficking

Trafficking in human beings is a worldwide phenomenon requiring an urgent and effective response. Nevertheless it remains a controversial subject, underpinned by the absence of accurate data on its extent and nature. An overall objective of this programme was to highlight the socio-economic and political context of trafficking, in addition to the practical issues of prosecution, identification and intervention that have dominated the UK discourse to date.

The importance of interdisciplinary participation was crucial for this programme and its overarching aim was to provide an opportunity for participants to ‘step outside’ their organisational priorities and into a space, both actual and conceptual, from which innovative and creative solutions could emerge.

Aim

To address the issue of human trafficking from a human rights perspective within a wider socio-economic and political context, through the involvement of individuals with substantial experience of direct service-delivery, policy development and research within Scotland and the wider UK context.

“The seminar series highlighted the challenges of securing multi-agency, national and international agreement on definitions of trafficking, ‘effective’ practice and ‘appropriate’ responses to the victims/survivors of trafficking in humans.”

A dedicated Human Trafficking Bill for Scotland was announced by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill. The proposals will:

Consolidate and strengthen existing criminal law against human trafficking.

Enhance the status of and support for the victims of trafficking.

Give statutory responsibility to relevant agencies to work with the Scottish Government to develop and implement a Scottish Anti-Trafficking Strategy.

“Ultimately we are determined to develop legislation that gives our police, prosecutors and other agencies the powers to make Scotland a hostile environment for human traffickers, but also helps to identify and support the needs of victims.”

March 2014

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www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/ Programmes/Programmes20122013/

HumanTrafficking.aspx

Programme Team:

Dr Margaret Malloch,University of Stirling

Dr Paul Rigby,University of Stirling

Programme: Human Trafficking

Insights

Key themes that emerged over the series included:

• Continuing problems with the concept, and definitions, of trafficking.

• The use of the legal system in preparing the ground for successful interventions and the limits of responses and interventions to date.

• A lack of academic critique, evidence, research and theoretical and conceptual analysis.

• The need for local and international responses to be linked together via an overarching ‘strategic’ approach.

It was also widely acknowledged that the often highly politicised responses, and/or inaction, are a result of the disparate types of exploitation and varying levels of global inequality and discrimination, compounded in the western world by concerns about migration across borders.

Outcomes

• Four briefing papers were produced and used to inform on-going work in Scotland including the Cross-Party Group on Trafficking hosted by the Scottish Parliament.

• The debates identified during the course of the programme have resulted in at least one academic article which will be submitted to relevant academic journals, including the European Journal of Criminology.

• The programme resulted in an increased awareness of the impact of trafficking in Scotland, the need for a coherent response, and the importance of agencies ensuring their organisations were able to respond to the need of victims.

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Programme: Child Death Review: Learning the Lessons, Differently

Each year in the UK around 260 children die or are seriously harmed and £5 million is spent “learning the lessons”. This project stemmed from recognition across many disciplines that the processes set up to learn lessons from child maltreatment deaths were not producing the desired outcomes in terms of reduction of fatalities and levels of child abuse. The project provided the opportunity for bring experts and professionals together from a range of disciplines, including forensic investigation, psychology, education, design, statistics, policing, law, social work and health, along with practitioners and key stakeholders from Scottish Government and the Crown Office, to hear fresh perspectives, tackle problem areas and develop collaborations to support public policy and interest in the protection of children.

Aim

To capture, process and disseminate information in the aftermath of child tragedies in cost-effective ways that increase the likelihood of lessons being learned and fewer children dying, drawing on the experiences of other UK and international jurisdictions.

“These events have been the catalyst for major changes in practice and policy that have the potential to reduce Scotland’s unacceptably high levels of child mortality”

“The death of a child is always a tragedy for the families and it’s only right that the reasons for that death are explored thoroughly to enable us to put in place measures that can help prevent any future tragedies. Setting up this standardised review system will help us to identify what, as a government, we can do to further reduce the rates of child mortality in Scotland and work more closely with families to support them through difficult times”

Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, Alex Neil, May 2014

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Programme: Child Death Review: Learning the Lessons, Differently

Insights

During the process of meeting, sharing and expanding knowledge, the programme came to focus on a number of key themes:

• Limited understanding of the roles of different professionals and of the constraints, obligations and legislation under which they operated.

• Lack of research and literature in the field of child death review and lack of knowledge of current work undertaken in the field.

• The challenge of keeping the child and the child’s story at the heart of review processes.

• Lack of awareness of different approaches across the UK - some jurisdictions working in collaborative ways that others assumed impracticable.

• The relationship of maltreatment deaths to all child fatalities in a population.

www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Programmes/Programmes20122013/ChildDeathReview.aspx

Programme Team:

Alyson Leslie,University of Dundee

Sue Black,University of Dundee

Teri Covington,US Center for Child Death Review

Kate Morris,University of Nottingham

Outcomes

• The implementation of a national Child Death Review System for Scotland which will hold reviews on all child fatalities in the country and collect extensive data on each child’s death to inform research into the causes of child fatalities, policy initiatives in health, safety and welfare and the prevention and investigation of child maltreatment deaths.

• A partnership has been developed with the US Center for the Review and Prevention of Child Death which as well as allowing access to vast data sources held there has led to the donation of their operating system and software used to record over 50,000 child fatalities a year to the University of Dundee, which has the potential to be adapted to hold data on all child fatalities in Scotland.

• A number of new collaborations and research proposals have developed, including a European funding bid involving 13 countries.

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Programme: Strengthening Democracy

To what extent do people learn about democracy through the organisations in which they work and the communities in which they live? What are the wider benefits of learning about democracy? This programme explored the extent to which organisational democracy and community involvement can strengthen broader civil involvement and participation in democracy at a time when Scotland approached a key decision on its future: The wider context for the programme was the Scottish Referendum on Independence held in September 2014.

A series of workshops focusing on Employee Ownership, Employee Engagement, and Community Ownership was complemented with visits to relevant sites including Tullis Russell, New Lanark and Neilston Community Development Trust and wind farm.

“Where greater participation is developed, through sharing information and through consultation processes in which the contributions of employees are appropriately acknowledged, both organisational effectiveness and the experience of working lives improve very significantly”

Community Empowerment Bill

“Published on 12 June 2014, the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill is designed to strengthen and nurture community participation and encourage enterprising community development.

The Bill will also embed Scotland’s world leading performance framework (Scotland Performs) in legislation, ensuring the Scottish Government remains focussed on improving outcomes for communities.”

Scottish Government, June 2014

Aim

• To strengthen Scotland’s democratic processes by raising awareness of the benefits of organisational and community involvement in decision-making.

• To shape Scotland’s future by helping business, community and political leaders to understand the importance of widening participation on all three levels.

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www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Programmes/Programmes20122013/

StrengtheningDemocracy.aspx

@SDemoc

Programme Team:

Dr Juliette Summers,University of Stirling

Dr Andrew Timming,University of St Andrews

David Erdal,University of St Andrews

Programme: Strengthening Democracy

Insights

• Employees should be recognised in the community empowerment legislation (or separately) as having the right to buy the companies where they work.

• The use of employee benefit trusts should be facilitated in the tax system.

• Advisers should be incentivised to offer all-employee buyouts to their clients.

Substantively, the programme was not about learning about politics, but about positively influencing attitudes toward democratic participation, not only among key decision-makers, but also within the general public.

Outcomes

• The programme team was invited to submit evidence on employee right to buy to the consultation on the Community Empowerment Bill.

• The team has submitted evidence on an employee right to buy to the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, Inquiry into Scotland’s Economic Future Post-2014.

• The team has also been invited to submit evidence (in collaboration with Oxfam Scotland) on employee right to buy to the Working Together (Mather) Review: Progressive Workplace Policies in Scotland.

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Details of all programmes funded by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute can be found on our website. Please contact us for further information on any of our programmes.